Sometimes they held human remains.
And as he approached the Chevy mired in the mucky, seaweed-laden sand, he saw that this car was not empty. A solid kick with his flippers brought him to the driver-side window.
A face stared out at him, the mouth widened in a giant O, as if in a desperate quest for breath.
The eyes…
Did not exist. Already, the creatures of the deep had started to feed.
“Maybe Osceola was a hero, but they still tricked him and caught him and cut his head off. They chopped it right off!” a young boy said. He was about ten, cute and normal-looking in a T-shirt that had clearly just been purchased at the local alligator farm, jeans and sneakers. But he spoke with a relish that unsettled Sarah McKinley. Caroline Roth, seated at the computer and running the audiovisual end of the Heritage House presentation, let out a soft laugh, stared at Sarah, then grinned wickedly and shrugged.
“No,” Sarah said firmly, and smoothed down the skirt of her period outfit. She was a good storyteller and knew how to handle a large—and diverse—group like the one in the lecture hall that day, which was a mix of kids and adults, tourists and locals, couples, groups and singles. They were into the tail end of summer, so she was getting classes from schools that started early and teachers from schools that started late. There was a Harley event down in Daytona that week, so she was getting a lot of bikers, too.
One man in the crowd, though, seemed to stand out. He was tall, but not inordinately so, maybe six-three. He was dressed as casually as the next tourist in blue jeans and a polo shirt, but he didn’t look like the usual tourist. He wore sunglasses throughout her lecture—not an odd thing, lots of people didn’t take them off when they came in. He was built as if he were in the service and worked out heavily on a daily basis, or as if he were an athlete. He was tanned and rugged, the way a man who spent his day sailing might be, tawny-haired and attractive. What was odd about him, though, was that he was alone. He seemed the type who should be with a beautiful woman, one who was as lithe and athletic as he was himself.
“Decapitated!” another kid called out.
Sarah’s attention was drawn back to her lecture. She had been talking about Osceola, the most famous leader of the Seminole people, who had galvanized friend and foe alike when he had struck a knife into a treaty that would have been a death knell for his people. Like so many others, he had been imprisoned at the Castillo de San Marcos, the coquina shell bastion built by the Spanish that was the most imposing architectural feature of the city.
Leave it to a kid to dwell on the most gruesome fact he could think of—not to mention that he had it wrong.
“History records lots of terrible things that were done, but that wasn’t one of them,” she said.
“Hey, I heard he was decapitated, too,” a grown man interrupted.
Sarah took a deep breath. She couldn’t really blame the guy—who had a sunburn identifying him as out-of-state—when even Florida schoolchildren often had the story wrong. “Osceola was a great leader, and respected even by his enemies. The treachery that led to his capture was deplorable, and despite the Indian wars raging across the country at the time, people despised General Jesup for the way he treated Osceola, who came in peace, with his safety guaranteed, and was taken anyway. But he wasn’t decapitated by the U.S. Army. He was held for a while at Fort Marion, originally known as the Castillo de San Marcos, but he died of malaria up at Fort Moultrie, in South Carolina. He was attended by a shaman from his own clan, and an American doctor, a man named Frederick Wheedon, who did have his head removed and embalmed, but only after he was already dead. And,” she said, unable to resist, “legend has it that Dr. Wheedon used the head to punish his children. If they behaved badly, he would leave the head on their bedposts at night. In fact, he bequeathed the head to his son-in-law—just in case his grandchildren misbehaved. His son-in-law passed it on to a man named Valentine Mott, another doctor, who kept it in a pathology museum, but the museum burned down, and the head was lost.”
She had gained the silent stares of everyone in the room, of every age, and she offered them a broad smile. “You can learn a lot about Osceola and Florida’s Native Americans over at Fort Marion, and we have wonderful books on Osceola and the history of the area in our bookstore. Remember, St. Augustine is over four hundred years old.” She grinned at the boy who had first brought up the subject of decapitation. “All kinds of gruesome things have happened here.”